More than Superhuman

A.E. van Vogt More than Superhuman (1971)
As I may have mentioned, van Vogt can be unusually chewy at times with intense, disorientating text which demands the reader's full attention, the pay off being - when he gets it right - a genuinely weird and atmospheric narrative unlike that of any other writer, carrying the same sense of something profound you get with those dreams in which some world changing revelation is forgotten as soon as you wake. Unfortunately, this collection is mostly just plain chewy.

Here we have six short stories following the superhuman theme - an obsession which informed much of van Vogt's writing, to be fair - although, two of the stories are just a couple of pages, meaning this is more like an assemblage of four novellas. I already read Humans Go Home! in The Gryb and unfortunately didn't find it any more comprehensible second time around. The Reflected Men is a little more convincing but is about twice as long as it needs to be, and dating from the late sixties to early seventies, much of this lot suggests some mumbled conversation about what women really like coming from the room next door. I don't think Alfred had much going on in the trouser department at this later stage of his career, and you can tell he's not happy about it, hence all those stories wrestling with his needs as a sexual being and the frigidity or otherwise of those damn women with their big ol' titties all wobbling up and down 'n' shit. It's not so much that he comes across as the Bernard Manning of science-fiction, but that it's a little uncomfortable watching an older man struggle with certain assumptions of his generation, even realising something doesn't add up, but never quite able to see the way through; and van Vogt is more or less a waste of time when he's not writing to his strengths. Keeping my attention affixed to the pages upon which Humans Go Home! had been printed was therefore a little like trying to hammer nails into concrete.

Thankfully Research Alpha more or less redeems the entire collection, keeping it fucking weird with a serum which flings patients off along many thousands of years of their own future evolution, and so sending me off to the internet just to check it wasn't something which had ended up filmed as an episode of The Outer Limits. It wasn't, but it's a collaboration with James H. Schmitz who was apparently noted as having a knack for writing female characters, thus compensating for one of his co-writer's weaknesses. So that's James H. Schmitz added to the list.

Lonely Boy

Steve Jones Lonely Boy (2016)
I'd heard good things about this one and it has exceeded my expectations. I've read a few books about the Pistols over the years and never anticipated that the best would be written by their guitarist, a man who, by his own admission, could barely read or write until he was in his thirties. To be fair, Lonely Boy wasn't so much written as told to some bloke with a tape recorder, so it reads like a transcription of a conversation in a pub; which might be a problem but for Jones being sharp as a knife and a genuine wit. It turns out that I didn't actually know much about the guy before this beyond a penchant for pies, beer and knobbing. I didn't realise quite how driven he was in pursuit of the same, or quite how expansive his career as petty criminal had been, or that he was clearly the most important Sex Pistol, the one without whom it would have been a different group and probably a waste of time.

Lonely Boy reminds me of nothing so much as being sat in the pub with Terry, with whom I used to work, talking complete bollocks, but complete bollocks with a point, and which ultimately says something profoundly meaningful about existence albeit in an indirect way. It's a fucking joy to read and makes most other rock autobiographies look like complete wank.

Jonesy, I tip my hat to you. This is the best thing I've read in a long, long time.

Makes Lydon look a bit of a twat too!

The Underwater Menace

Nigel Robinson The Underwater Menace (1988)
I wasn't quite up to processing Voltaire at bedtime, so I toggled Candide and His Legion of Colourful Pals with this, a novelisation of a childrens' show from the sixties, praying it wouldn't be anything like so annoying as Tomb of Valdemar, my previous helping of time-travelling comfort food. It's a simple story which no-one likes, I reasoned, so there's less that can go wrong.

Amazingly, this actually turned out to be the case. The Underwater Menace was criticised for, amongst other things, its fish people - mutated humans effected by gluing stuff found in a box under the sink to the actors' faces - despite that the television serial was unfortunately wiped so only three people presently alive have actually seen it. Of course, the problem with shit effects is that they remind us we're watching a low budget kids show and not something really graet and proper and grown up like Babylon 5. I'm sure there will be persons who have criticised the writing on this one, but I can't see the point. This stuff was never meant to compete with A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I'm not sure The Underwater Menace actually has a story. I mean, take a look at the ingredients:

• Atlantis survived submersion.
• Primitive types who can be influenced by white person stood behind statue of tribal God speaking in a funny voice.
• Companions captured and immediately subjected to either hard labour or medical experiments.
• Mad scientist.

Seriously, if you still need a fucking synopsis of what happens, you've got something wrong with you; and pointing out that it's all a bit basic seems a little redundant, no?

The Underwater Menace is Edgar Rice Burroughs, more or less. It has a job to do, and the book at least does it well, because Nigel Robinson knows how to write and hasn't somehow misread the commission, assuming it to be a portentous voice-over for super duper audio dramas based on bingeworthy television shows. The narrative is stripped down, as you might expect, but is clearly quite happy to be a novel comprising words printed on pages; and it's written with just enough flair to keep it interesting, even to justify its existence over simply being a substitute for something else. It's corny as shit for sure, but I prefer to view it as a familiar song played well, taking my pleasure in how much this actually reminds me of one of Richard Shaver's weird fantasies, and the beautiful simplicity of a mad scientist who wants to blow up the world because he's mad, and that's exactly the sort of thing a mad scientist would do. Well duh…

Sometimes that's all you need.

Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories

Voltaire Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories (1775)
My quest for Voltaire's Micromégas finally brought me here, Micromégas being your boy's concession to proto-science-fiction wherein an enormous bloke from Saturn meets an even more enormouser bloke from Sirius and they have a conversation about stuff. This also meant re-reading Candide, which was actually a pleasure as this seems to be a significantly better translation than the first one I tried; or at least I got more of the jokes.

While Micromégas and Memnon - which also features a person from Sirius - are of obvious interest as proto-science-fiction, the fantastic aspects serve primarily to support points made in the other stories by different, more prosaic means, so there's probably not much fun to be had in examining Voltaire as a sort of eighteenth century Peter F. Hamilton; so I won't.

Voltaire's philosophical focus seems mostly concerned with the disparity between that to which humanity aspires, and that which it is seen to do; so his stories tend to be populated by optimists forever finding themselves bitten in the ass by an unexpectedly harsh reality. Reduced to its most basic form, I'd say he's exploring the gulf between objective and subjective experience, and in doing so, pointing out which emperors happen to be wandering around in the nip, albeit without quite the same degree of bile as Jonathan Swift.

This collection comprises four longer stories and a bunch of much shorter efforts, some of just a couple of pages length. It almost certainly helps if you understand elements of eighteenth century politics and the history of France, which I don't, so those tales with a more obviously eastern influence - notably Zadig - came across as a little dry for my tastes, meaning there's not much point reading them unless one's powers of concentration are fully engaged; but Voltaire's wit and insight tend to be a constant, allowing one to power through even when lacking the faintest fucking clue as to what he's talking about; and while I can see why Candide seems to be regarded as his hit single, both Ingenuous and Count Chesterfield's Ears and Chaplain Goodman are just as lively, just as philosophically rich, and just as worthy of our attention.

Tomb of Valdemar

Simon Messingham Tomb of Valdemar (2000)
Why do I do this to myself? It was the usual thing - shitty times justifying the written equivalent of comfort food because I'm too psychologically punch drunk to tackle Voltaire or any of the other stuff on the shelf of books purchased but as yet unread. I used to buy a couple of these Who things a month and read them religiously, and because that was more or less all I fucking read at the time, I lacked anything decent by which to make comparison, and so my filter was set pretty low. Some were great - as I've been able to confirm during more recent re-readings - and others were less great, meaning that attempted re-readings undertaken on this side of the millennium can be sometimes akin to tackling a Rupert annual, which is particularly disappointing when you have an apparently false memory of it having been at least up to the standard of Asimov or whoever.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Rupert annuals, by the way, but then I don't remember having read a Rupert annual which thought it was China Miéville.

Tomb of Valdemar has the reputation - at least in my head - of being the one where Simon Messingham got it right. It therefore seemed a safe bet, despite The Indestructible Man - which I read back in 2016 - being pure shite. Assorted Goodreads drones hail Tomb as being proper science-fiction like the stuff by all those guys who wrote those books they haven't actually read, or else miss the point completely by praising Tom Baker who is a television actor and as such had what I would suggest should be considered an entirely peripheral influence on this masterpiece.

Anyway, to get to the point, here we have Baker's Doctor imaginatively transposed to what is more or less Lovecraft's Call of Cthulhu, but written so as to really, really, really make it feel like something which was on telly whilst also invoking Lovecraft at his most purple. The story is actually decent and not without a sense of invention, but the author insists on addressing both us and his characters in the rhetorical tone of a ponderous seventies Marvel comic, asking Tom Baker if he really thought that was a good idea, asking what he didst imagineth wouldst happen, and all that sort of shit liberally seasoned with ohs and ahs and self-conscious asides referring to whether or not we readers are getting anything out of Messingham's testimony; which I sort of wasn't. Tomb initially reads with the cadence of someone who would rather be telling you the story out loud while pulling spooky faces in a room lit only with black candles, so naturally there's a shitload of those inactive sentences wherein the full stop is used to invoke a portentous Orson Welles voice over; which I guess the author believes is dramatic, but which suggests a basic lack of ability. At least to me. Because it's obvious. And tedious. Just crap.

Also, one of the characters is described wearing a Red Dwarf T-shirt, so tee hee. Hooray for super bingeworthy cult telly shows. Plus there's Huvan, the pimple-spattered comedy adolescent who writes terrible poetry and takes himself far too seriously, which would be funnier if it didn't feel as though we were reading one of his efforts.

To be fair, this still pisses all over The Unreadable Man, which admittedly isn't saying much, and there's enough going on to infer there having been a decent novel in here somewhere, albeit one which has been obscured by its own telling. I really hope the other five million I'm still to revisit aren't quite so shabby as this.

The Mystery Play

Grant Morrison & John J. Muth The Mystery Play (1994)
I'm pretty sure I had this at the time but it didn't leave much of an impression due to an ongoing bout of comic book indigestion. Anyway, I'm better now, so here we are again. Muth's photorealist watercolours are at the most breathtaking I've seen, and Morrison reigns in his usual excesses to tell a proper grown-up story with allegories and everything. Comic book mythology being what it is, I can't help feeling this may have been written in the spirit of showing that silly Alan Moore once and for all, which may even inform the final scene wherein the gruesome reality of the tale we've just read is sold for presumably underwhelming development to some television dude coincidentally named Alan; and yet, for the sake of argument, show him it does in so much as that I can't really imagine himself achieving such lightness of touch without all the component parts having been nailed to some labyrinthine flow chart, somewhat spoiling the effect.

The narrative spins around the contemporary setting of a mystery play in which someone murders the bloke playing God, so God is dead, and without so much as a nudge, a wink, or anyone screaming do you see what I'm saying? in your face. The detective who seeks the truth of the murder is himself revealed to be hardly lacking in sin for which he's literally crucified, thus ultimately bringing salvation to the town, although there's a question mark hanging over whether the salvation provided has actually made anything better. As for what any of this might be saying, I guess it's saying quite a lot of things, and none of them so regulated or clearly defined as to be ticked off on an imaginary list as job done. The potential for ambiguity is why it works, and why it feels crafted rather than merely assembled - as with a piece of music, you simply have to read the thing, because descriptions - including this one - will be something else entirely; and neither a Mason nor a Lovecraftian space octopus to be seen.

If You Have Ghosts

Douglas Payne If You Have Ghosts (2019)
Here's another coming of age narrative - as I'm sure some idiot will eventually call it - from Amphetamine Sulphate - very much its own thing, but likely to strike chords with anyone who enjoyed their books from Meg McCarville or Josh Peterson; so we're dealing with childhood, memory, emerging sexuality, and often in terms of the details most writers tend to excise, the parts which don't fit. Despite any reputations which may still be lingering, I'd say Philip Best is right to harbour a certain ambivalence regarding the transgressive tag. If You Have Ghosts isn't the Waltons, and Hollywood would leave out all the elements which make the story what it is, but this is only outsider when you consider that most of us are outsiders by some definition, at least anyone worth talking to. We all have ghosts.

This one had me hooked from the first page, upon which I read.

Aside from Barney and his space exploration, I loved a Sesame Street video where Big Bird and Snuffleupagus are in ancient Egypt. Big Bird dies and he is judged by Osiris in preparation for the afterlife, his heart weighed against one of his own plucked feathers.

As with the best of the imprint, Ghosts keeps hold of its sense of humour without feeling the need to crack jokes and renders emotion without resorting to sentiment, limiting itself to just the stuff you need. Weirdly, and it may be due simply to the amber tint of south-west geography, Payne's writing reminds me of Ray Bradbury of all people, except where Dandelion Wine all but chokes on its own syrup, this one is clear, uncongested, and rich in flavour. It may even be the most powerful, convincing and confident piece of writing that Amphetamine Sulphate have published since the New Juche books.

I know literature is supposedly a dying art, but it doesn't much look like it from here.

Mu Revealed

Tony Earll Mu Revealed (1970)
Despite being in possession of a more or less fully operational brain, I'm a sucker for this kind of Fortean bollocks providing it's entertaining on some level, so this one was difficult to resist. Mu Revealed purports to tell the story of the lost continent of Mu through reference to the eyewitness account of Kland, a young priest and citizen of the same. Kland wrote about his life on a series of ancient scrolls, although obviously they weren't ancient at the time of writing - some thousand or so years prior to Mu sinking beneath the waves. The scrolls were found during an archaeological excavation in the Valley of Mexico, to which Kland had retired at some point in later life.

I knew this one was going to be tough. Not only am I pretty certain that Mu never existed, but I've spent too long immersed in Mesoamericana to suspend disbelief when these crackpots start making it up or citing implausible sources, as they always do - every fucking time.

The alarm bells rang earlier than I'd anticipated. Our boy kicks off describing the excavation of an amazing buried city in the Valley of Mexico, giving no more specific location than that it's in the north-west of the valley. A clay figurine from this dig is named the Hurdlop Venus, having been discovered by Earll's colleague, Dr. Reesdon Hurdlop, later renamed the Texcoco Venus by actual archaeologists, which is weird because Texcoco is very much in the south-east of the valley, and that's one big fucking valley. The author additionally implies that they had specifically set out in search of relics relating to lost continents on the grounds of this unidentified locale being exactly the sort of place a refugee from a lost continent might settle. Then we have page after page describing goings on at the dig, who had which amazing hunch, who was surprised by what they found and so on and so forth - all a bit Edgar Rice Burroughs, I thought.

I vowed that I wasn't going to allow myself to be influenced by researching Mu Revealed on the internet, hoping to give the author a fair crack at pulling the wool over my eyes, but I just couldn't not take a sneaky peak. Mu Revealed, it turns out, is a parody - or so ran the description I found - and the author is one Raymond Buckland writing as Tony Earll, an anagram of not really. Another anagram would be Reesdon Hurdlop, which comes from Rudolph Rednose, and Hurdlop's female colleagues, Maud N. Robat and Ruby Kraut, also sounded suspiciously fictitious.

So I persevered in anticipation of something cannily taking the piss out of the sort of book this purports to be, or at least in anticipation of something amusingly ripe. The closest it came was Buckland's analysis of Kland's testimony regarding the ocean going longboats of Mu being covered in silver. Buckland suggests this as the most likely interpretation of the narrative, although admits he doesn't want to rule out the possibility of said massive boats being quite literally made of silver.

See, I couldn't really tell if that was supposed to be a zinger or not. The civilisation described by Kland seems to be the usual variation on Greek, Roman and Egyptian society with a bit of Ben Hur thrown in, and if it's marginally more entertaining than what Buckland writes as Tony Earll, it's still pretty fucking dull due to our notional priest dutifully recording - for the benefit of future generations - even the most mundane details of his existence and what type of trousers he wore on certain days of the week. It's almost as though this was written by someone with no imagination.

Further research reveals that Buckland was better known for his books of magic, Wicca, and the occult, so it's difficult to see how this is genuinely a parody, as distinct from just some bloke telling lies, making things up, and wheeling out the snake oil in hope of paying a few bills; and Robat, as in Maud N. Robat, was actually Buckland's special magic name—sorry, of course I meant his special magick name. I was hoping that, at worst, this might be interesting as modern mythology, perhaps reflecting upon the psychological aspect of the stories we tell about things which don't exist, but really it's just some dude taking the piss; which is why I skimmed the second half. I have other stuff to read and, crackers though he may well have been, Richard S. Shaver did a better job.